Top painters create unique acrylic paintings on computers.

advertisement

M. RAHMAN

November 30, 1999

ISSUE DATE: December 31, 1990

UPDATED: October 17, 2013 17:32 IST

A swathe of luminous colour sweeps across the screen. The outline of a face emerges, and is as quickly erased. A leaf appears suspended in mid-air, and magically reproduces itself. A bright red pot disintegrates into a million pink particles. Colours, lines and shapes quiver and disappear.

A child playing a new kind of computer game? A graphic designer trying to work out a television title sequence? Neither. Computer graphics software is now being utilised for a different purpose - creating works of art by some of India's best known painters.

Two years ago, Abhay Mangaldas, who runs a computer graphics unit, and Sonal Zaveri, an art enthusiast, together initiated a path-breaking computer aided art project. The project immediately fired the imagination of some of India's leading painters such as M.F. Husain, Akbar Padamsee, Raza, Laxman Shreshta, Prabhakar Barve, Navjot, Manjit Bawa and Atul Dodiya.

Painters have now before them a formidable array of possibilities and an unimaginable freedom on screen to draw, apply colour, animate,
smudge, invert, blend and distort.

The computer aided art project, which was conceived and executed over two continents, was kept under wraps until last fortnight when the first canvases arrived from England. What the painters had created on a Macintosh II PC in Bombay was encoded onto diskettes and taken to another computer unit in London, where the image was transferred onto large canvases.

The result: 24 unique acrylic paintings which will be unveiled at a major group show, called State of the Art, on January 5. "Computer art on canvas - this has never been done before. Artists in Europe and the US have been using the computer to create works on paper, but what we have done here is something new," says Padamsee, who shuttles between studios in Paris and Bombay.

Said Husain: "Only the computer's graphic potential has been utilised by painters in the West till now. But Indian painters have done something unique - we have used the computer to create actual canvases." The unique art project was born out of boredom.

Mangaldas and Prism Graphics owner Ajay Sharma were feeling jaded by run-of-the-mill assignments like designing graphics and setting type for publishers and other commercial clients.

They then hit upon the idea of roping in painters to create computer aided art. Zaveri, who was studying computer animation at Prism Graphics, took on the task of persuading artists to join the project.

Admits Husain: "In the beginning I just wanted to run away. Gradually, however, as more and more Indian artists overcame their initial hesitation, the unusual project was eventually able to take off.

While Mangaldas combined elements from a number of graphic software programmes to create an omnibus hard disc programme for use by the artists, Zaveri pursued the sceptical painters like a mythical muse, making them overcome their loathing for electronic gadgetry and agree to experiment on a computer screen.

"I was very suspicious in the beginning. For three days I just sat and watched my wife Sunita (also a painter) work on the computer," recalls Shreshta.

Zaveri sat with them throughout, guiding, cajoling, even calming frayed tempers. Painters normally used to facing a blank canvas with a handful of colours on the palette were now confronted with a formidable array of possibilities - 16 million colour shades, a 'menu' under half a dozen categories, and a 'tool-box' available with 32 basic functions combining to produce a seemingly infinite number of permutations and combinations.

The artist suddenly had unimaginable freedom while working on the screen - to draw, apply colour, animate the drawing, multiply the image, scan another drawing or painting onto it, smudge, distort, invert, blend colours, introduce screens, and so on.

The possibilities were endless: to experiment at every stage, store what had already been done, or even go back to the original if the experiments were unsuccessful.

There was also a choice of controls - a pen-like stick on a magnetic board, or an electronic 'mouse' on a rubber pad. "It was so fascinating, the computer was like a toy in our hands, and sometimes we accidentally got effects we hadn't even visualised," observes Navjot.

The project grew in scope even as work was in progress. Zaveri and Mangaldas, who set up a new company Brahma to promote computer aided art, at first attracted painters with the promise of creating low-priced, multiple-edition graphic art on paper.

But Mangaldas stumbled onto a new process developed by an Australian computer engineer and used till now mainly for creating theatre or shopwindow backdrops - transferring an image from a diskette to a canvas by spraying water-based acrylic inks through computer controlled jets.

The spray jets contain only the four primary colours, which combine according to the electronically coded data on the diskette to create a variety of colours and shades.

The acrylic ink is guaranteed not to fade or crack for 100 years, an unprecedented assurance in an art market where complaints are heard about deteriorating oil paintings. The result, as Zaveri describes it: exclusive electronic canvases.

The change in scope, however, raised costs and has pushed up prices alienating some of the painters initially attracted to the project due to its mass appeal.

Computer aided art will sell at prices even higher than what the artists' normal canvases fetch. Moreover, since it is a pioneering effort, Brahma is also taking a much higher commission than the 35-per cent usually charged by commercial galleries.

Undoubtedly, what the painters have created with the help of the Macintosh is something extraordinary. The acrylic canvases may lack the variation in texture typical of traditional oil paintings, but the uniformly applied colours create a distinctive, tapestry-like quality.

The basic structure of a computer image consists of pixels, thousands of tiny squares which combine to form a picture. Some painters, like Padamsee and Shreshta, have emphasised the pixelish qualities of the image, introducing an abstract element in the nudes and mountainscapes.

Others, like Bawa and Dodiya, have used contrasting luminous and dark or flat colours to recreate images reminiscent of their oil canvases. Husain has utilised the computer to let loose a miasma of rich, dark imagery, while Navjot has taken advantage of the facility to reproduce images in her brooding figurative studies.

Barve is the only painter who used the computer just to visualise the image, transferring it onto canvas by hand with enamel paint. Of the other painters, some refused to touch the canvas after it was printed except to sign their names, while some worked on it further with a brush. "It was a fusion of art and technology. Perhaps through this fusion a new art could evolve," says Barve of the computer aided art project.

Although some of the painters may have found the experience of working on a computer slightly disorienting at first, all their fears and anxieties are now a thing of the past. They are all excited by the unveiling of the computer's potential as a tool in artistic creation. The electronic 'mouse' may yet nibble its way into the history of art.

Get real-time alerts and all the news on your phone with the all-new India Today app. Download from